Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [7]
“ ‘One for My Baby’—Dad owned that song in Asia. You ask any Chinese over seventy who wrote that song, who sang it, and they’ll say it’s Al Fong. They’ll say Sinatra ripped Al off. ‘One for my baby … One more for the road’ … that’s the way we lived. That’s how we Chinese lived. Dad made it into a song of lost identity. That’s why Sinatra sounds such a whinge, to tell the truth.”
I studied the color photo of the crooner with pomaded hair and a gold-capped smirk. Frankie would never wear Al’s blue satin jacket with the black velvet piping nor the gold lamé vest, but I could picture him—at twenty-two, at thirty-two—lounge-lizarding in a tacky Asian nightclub, cigarette in one hand, mike pressed to his lips with the other, eyes sparkling from the stage lights, the drops and the drugs, diamond cuff links glittering, karaokeing “My Way” to black marketeers and their mistresses. Those were Frankie’s origins, before he stripped off the finery, slapped on a headband, became Flash and took to beating sense into outer-space aliens, cowboys, bikers, Maoists and French colonials in a series of kick-boxing spectaculars.
He didn’t ask me about my origins, and I volunteered nothing. I was the innocent upstate Italian, playing a cameo role in my own life.
Frankie’s memories of growing up on permanent tours of China-in-exile made squalor and malice sound educational. From the way he talked about life-from-a-suitcase in hotel rooms, I understood why owning showy property on Union Avenue was so important to him. I coveted property too, but a different kind of property. I coveted the deed to my shadowy parentage. To a cornered rat, hunger and greed, ambition and wish fulfillment, are synonyms.
Frankie needed to remember, and I needed to discover. He talked. But I wanted more; I wanted details, wanted to know the smell of fishing boats on Thai canals and the sound of monsoon rains on tin roofs. He reminisced. Of pariah dogs and flying foxes, floating bodies, ancient ruins, temple bells, Muslim calls, diesel fumes, painted “lorries.” More hash than butter, he boasted. Fevers, drugs, backroom-behind-the-beaded-curtain Asia. Playing card games with child prostitutes between clients, singing for the madams, picking the pockets of American marines on R and R, chasing monkeys in grassy ruins, shimmying up slippery trunks of giant palms, packing his father’s opium into false-bottomed trunks: Frankie made an Asian childhood sound great fun, something I wanted to claim, something I’d been robbed of. But by whom? By the California hippie who’d fucked a Eurasian thug so I could be born in that place, over there, where nightmare and poem merge? By the Gray Nuns who placed me oceans away from my orphan origins? By Pappy and Mama who believe love wipes misery clean?
From that night on I envied Frankie. As a boy he’d been everywhere the Chinese had settled: Calcutta, Bangkok, Saigon, Singapore, Manila, Jakarta, Sydney. He’d seen it all, the tin shacks and smoky dives of overseas Chinatowns, before assimilation or persecution closed them down. In Frankie’s Asia, the streets were always hot, loud, smoky, full of cheats and drugs and whores; the nightclubs were always places of viciousness and degradation and carnality. From Frankie the Son’s stories, I pictured Al the Dad, the sleek, hatchet-faced man with slicked-back, dyed hair, sitting offstage on a stool, alternately vomiting into a bucket and spraying his throat with a minty concoction mixed by Baby, then smoking a last cigarette down to Sinatra’s approved length before making his entrance. Pappy became my dad a million times removed. Thanks to those stories, for the first time I felt connected. The DiMartinos were the aliens.
How could I explain all that to Frankie, who confided, “That’s why I took up karate, you see. It was